Main menu

Nothing Twice + We Have a Back Room With Other Things

NOTHING TWICE

Heaven Gallery is pleased to present Nothing Twice, a two-person show featuring two Chicago based artists, Magda Dudziak and Annette Hur.
Dudziak’s practice explore topics of displacement, memory, intimacy and relationships. Through abstraction and process of deconstruction/reconstruction she is interested to interpret familiar places that over time get altered and reimagined and to question how physical and psychological experiences of displacement effect and reshape a sense of one’s identity.
Hur’s practice lies in narrative potential in relation to history of forgotten struggles of the face in different cultures and our mind reading ability. Hur navigates shifting identities - cultural and social - as to from long history of decolonization of her own country to direct observation of present moments. Borrowing and elaborating the space of our most revealing part: face, she creates images that plays dichotomy between rendering the surface of the face and the interiority of it to open the meaning to certain culture or history of individuals. Serial attitude as the act of keep recording those freeze faces with flux and transforming them into infinite spaces let viewers fill in the ambiguity and completes the narrative.

Magda Dudziak is an artist born in Poland. Dudziak holds BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she studied in Painting and Drawing Department. She is a recipient of Edward L. Ryerson Fellowship and is currently a MFA Candidate at the University of Illinois in Studio Arts. Dudziak work has been exhibited at Hokin Gallery, Woman Made, Beverly Arts Center, Artis’t Run The Satellite Show in Miami, and Woskob Family among others. Dudziak currently lives and works in Chicago.

Annette Hur is originally from Korea, and has been living and working in Chicago since 2013. Her practice lies in narrative potential in relation to history of forgotten struggles of the face in different cultures and our mind reading ability. Hur navigates shifting identities - cultural and social - as to from long history of decolonization of her own country to direct observation of present moments. Borrowing and elaborating the space of our most revealing part: face, she creates images that plays dichotomy between rendering the surface of the face and the interiority of it to open the meaning to certain culture or history of individuals. Serial attitude as the act of keep recording those freeze faces with flux and transforming them into infinite spaces let viewers fill in the ambiguity and completes the narrative.
Hur is currently a resident at Chicago Artists Coalition BOLT residency, and she has exhibited at Gallery X, Zhou B Art Center in Chicago and Mist gallery among others. Hur holds BA(education) from Ewha Womans University in South Korea, and BFA(painting and drawing) from School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

WE HAVE A BACK ROOM WITH OTHER THINGS

Mel Cook and Megan Stroech address the conceptual space of the conventional through a combination of images, objects and replications. Taking a skewed glance at domesticity and the production of place, their collaboration makes various gestures towards a generalization of home that is at once political, satirical, man-made and personal.

Both artists make work that is most comfortable communicating indirectly. Megan Stroech’s irreverent approach to material and the appropriation of luxury puts her work both at odds with authenticity and squarely embedded in it. By straddling humor and earnestness, the real and the fake, and the original and the reproduced, she initiates a conversation between high and low culture that invites the viewer to have the last say. Like Stroech’s sculptural compositions and installations, Mel Cook’s paintings disrupt traditional models of space. Cook’s work is often evasive, gesturing loosely towards the political of the everyday and the construct of place-making, while embracing the way images often fail in their attempts to articulate. Permanence collapses into suggestion, and desire for the represented object quickly switches to ambivalence.

If both artists’ work moves towards a translation of home, it is one mediated.

Mel Cook is a visual artist currently living and working in Chicago, Illinois. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio in 2009 and attended Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois where she received her Master of Fine Arts in Painting in 2012. She has previously taught at Illinois State University and Illinois Central College. She currently teaches at Marwen in Chicago, Illinois. Her work has been featured in Art in Print, Studio Visit magazine, and most recently in New American Paintings, Midwest ed. No 125. This year she was a participant in The Center Program at Hyde Park Art Center and a resident at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Most recently her work has been exhibited at The Hyde Park Art Center.

Megan Stroech is an artist living and working in Chicago, IL. Stroech received her MFA in Printmaking with Exceptional Merit from Illinois State University in 2012, and her BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. Stroech was a recent artist in residence at the Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY) and has completed artist residencies at Chicago Artist Coalition’s HATCH Projects (Chicago, IL) and ACRE (Steuben, WI). Stroech has been a featured artist in the contemporary art publications: Artforum, Hyperallergic, LVL3 Media, and New American Paintings. Some recent exhibitions include: Ortega Y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY), PULSE Contemporary Art Fair (Miami Beach, FL), Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center (Austin, TX), Fernwey (Chicago, IL), ROCKELMANN& (Berlin, Germany), The SUB-MISSION (Chicago), and Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Snowmass, CO), where she was an artist-in- residence in 2012